Coming back online to over 15,000 emails puzzled me, slightly.

"I get a lot of spam, but this seems awfully high"

I downloaded the first 500 or so emails and noticed all the emails have something in common: they're all bounces. This had had happened to me a few years ago with another of my domains.

I should have learned not to have a catch all account!!

Seems like my domain (therockstargame.com) has made it on to a spammers list and god knows how much spam has been sent with somethingrandom@therockstargame.com set as the 'FROM' email address. 15,000 emails bounced but I have no idea or way of finding out how many emails were sent.

I'm going to now search the emails on the server for "delivery-status" (most bounces will mention this in the email header), and then for words like "failure", "undeliverable", "undelivered", "returned mail".

Most of the emails bouncing back had the topic "Windows Vista Business ready to download" and a lot of email addresses that have been abandoned and left to collect spam are bouncing "inbox full" messages back.

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Update: From 14,654 emails I got it down to 350, which isn't so bad. Only 11 of those emails were genuine, however. GRR

I've just been over a week without an internet connection. It's horrid!

I wish I could say I'd been on a holiday but that wasn't the case… my router died :/

Unfortunately it didn't go out in style: I didn't witness an explosion of any kind, see any fire or hear anything… It was a few years old, so it was about time upgraded.

Clearly, it didn't take me over a week to buy a new router (I got one Friday) - I decided to take a bit of a break from being online. The best parts were the football (Blackpool) and going to the pub a couple of times.

Anyway, now I have returned I still need to complete 'day four' of banishforever.com which will happen this week. I'm thinking either Tuesday or Friday for that.

I'll be doing a spam count again this week to see by how much it has reduced and then I'll look at reducing the amount even more and I'll give details on how I hope to do that.

Now I am to spend tim egoing through all the RSS feeds I have in IE7…

I waste lots of time each day wading through the spam I receive. I don't tend to delete them, just leave them in my mail box. In fact I never delete emails - I'm VERY disorganised.

In July I took some measures to reduce the number of spam emails I was getting through. I created a new email account and added, as 'aliases', email addresses that spam was frequently being sent to ('abbey@' for  some reason was receiving a lot of spam email!?!)

I checked this account yesterday and it has stored 87,420 emails since last July. WOW… and they're the ones that DIDN'T get through!

I worked out that's an average of just over 500 emails blocked per day. I then counted the amount of spam I was sent yesterday and you can add another 600 to that total. So call it 1,100 spam emails a day.

I’m going try and reduce that number. Spam is getting out of control!

I've enabled an option in MailEnable, my servers email software, to check a DNS Blacklist which will basically prevent any emails getting through from reported open relays and the like. I'll have to see how that goes.

I'll also be adding more aliases to the list I already have and I'll re-report in a week or so on the level of spam continuing to get through.

Is everyone sent this much spam or is it just me?

Here’s a list of 5 things I’m most looking forward to or wanting to purchase in 2007. It’s a bit varied and I’ll miss out the obvious things like ‘world peace’ (I’ll leave that to Bono)

In no particular order:

• Microsoft's Zune
• New Brett Anderson album & tour
• Blackpool's promotion to 'The Championship'
• Supreme Commander
• New PC (to play the above!)

I don’t think there’s anything there that isn’t reasonable. Number one priority is getting the gig project complete but that’s only a week or two off.